that no writer has equalled Bunyan in making this doctrine understood. 2. To treat well of supernatural impressions, one must have been subject to them. Bunyan had that kind of imagination which produces them. Powerful as that of an artist, but more vehement, this imagination worked in the man without his cooperation, and besieged him with visions which he had neither willed nor foreseen. From that moment there was in him, as it were, a second self, dominating the first, grand and terrible, whose apparitions were sudden; its motions unknown; which redoubled or crushed his faculties, prostrated or transported him, bathed him in the sweat of anguish, ravished him with trances of joy; and which by its force, strangeness, independence, impressed upon him the presence and the action of a foreign and superior master. 3. Bunyan was born in the lowest and most despised rank, a tinker's son; himself a wandering tinker, with a wife as poor as himself, so that they had not a spoon or a dish between them. He had been taught in childhood to read and write, but he had since "almost wholly lost what he had learned." Education draws out and disciplines a man; fills him with varied and rational ideas; prevents him from sinking into monomania, or being excited by transport; gives him determinate thoughts instead of eccentric fancies, pliable opinions for fixed convictions; replaces impetuous images by calm reasonings, sudden resolves by results of reflection; furnishes us with the wisdom and ideas of others; gives us conscience and self-command. Suppress this reason and this discipline, and consider the poor workingman at his work. His head works while his hands work—not ably, with methods acquired from any logic he might have mustered, but with dark emotions, beneath a disorderly flow of confused images. Morning and evening, the hammer which he uses in his trade drives in with its deafening sounds the same thought, perpetu ally returning and self-communing. A troubled, obstinate vision floats before him in the brightness of the hammered and quivering metal. In the red furnace where the iron is bubbling, in the clang of the hammered brass, in the black corners where the damp shadow creeps, he sees the flame and darkness of hell, and hears the rattling of eternal chains. Next day he sees the same image; the day after, the whole week, month, year. During his long solitary wanderings over wild heaths, in cursed and haunted bogs, always abandoned to his own thoughts, the inevitable idea pursues him. These neglected roads where he sticks in the mud; these sluggish rivers which he crosses on the cranky ferryboat; these threatening whispers of the woods at night, where in perilous places the livid moon shadows out ambushed forms—all that he sees and hears falls into an involuntary poem around the one absorbing idea. Thus it changes into a vast body of sensible legends, and multiplies its power as it multiplies its details. 4. Having become a dissenter, Bunyan is shut up for twelve years, having no other amusement than the Book of Martyrs and the Bible, in one of those infectious prisons where the Puritans rotted under the Restoration. There he is, still alone, thrown back upon himself by the monotony of his dungeon, besieged with the terrors of the Old Testament, by the vengeful outpourings or denunciations of the prophets, by the thunder-striking words of Paul, by the spectacle of trances and of martyrs, face to face with God; now in despair, now consoled; troubled with involuntary images and unlooked-for emotions, seeing alternately devil and angels, the actor and the witness of an internal drama, whose vicissitudes he is able to relate. He writes them—it is his book. You see now the condition of this inflamed brain. Poor in ideas, full of images, given up to a fixed and single thought, plunged into this thought by his mechanical pursuit, by his prison and his readings, by his knowledge and his ignorance, circumstances, like nature, make him a visionary and an artist, furnish him with supernatural impressions and sensible images, teaching him the history of grace and the means of expressing it. 5. Allegory, the most artificial kind, is natural to Bunyan. It he employs it throughout, it is from necessity, not choice. As children, countrymen, and all uncultivated minds, he transforms arguments into parables; he only grasps truth when it is made simple by images; abstract terms elude him; he must touch forms, and contemplate colors. His repetitions, embarrassed phrases, familiar comparisons, his frank style, whose awkwardness recalls the childish periods of Herodotus, and whose lightheartedness recalls tales for children, prove that if his work is allegorical, it is so in order that it may be intelligible, and that Bunyan is a poet because he is a child. 6. Again, under his simplicity you will find power, and in his puerility intuition. These allegories are hallucinations as clear, complete, and sound as ordinary perceptions. No one but Spenser is so lucid. He distinguishes and arranges all the parts of the landscape-here the river, on the right the castle, a flag on its left turret, the setting sun three feet lower, an oval cloud in the front part of the sky-with the preciseness of a carpenter. Dialogues flow from his pen as in a dream. He does not seem to be thinking; we should even say that he was not himself there. Events and speeches seem to grow and dispose themselves within him independently of his will. Nothing, as a rule, is colder than are the characters in an allegory. His are living. Looking upon these details, so small and familiar, illusion gains upon us. Giant Despair, a simple abstraction, becomes as real in his hands as an English jailer or farmer. 7. Bunyan has the freedom, the tone, the ease, and the clearness of Homer. He is as close to Homer as an Anabaptist tinker could be to an heroic singer, a creator of gods. I err; he is nearer: before the sentiment of the sublime, inequalities are levelled. The depth of emotion raises peasant and poet to the same eminence; and here, also, allegory stands the peasant in stead. It alone, in the absence of ecstasy, can paint heaven; for it does not pretend to paint it. Expressing it by a figure, it declares it invisible as a glowing sun at which we cannot look full, and whose image we observe in a mirror or a stream. The ineffable world thus retains all its mystery. Warned by the allegory, we imagine splendors beyond all which it presents to us. 8. Bunyan was imprisoned for twelve years and a half. In his dungeon he made laces to support himself and his family. He died at the age of sixty in 1688. At the same time, Milton linThe last two poets of the Reforma gered obscure and blind. tion thus survived amid the classical coldness which then dried up English literature, and the social excess which then corrupted English morals. THE GOLDEN CITY. [INTRODUCTION.-The following extract forms the last chapter of the Pilgrim's Progress, characterized by Macaulay as "the only work of its kind [the allegorical] which possesses a strong human interest." The full title of the work is, The Pilgrim's Progress from this World to that which is to Come, delivered under the Similitude of a Dream. It was written by Bunyan while imprisoned in Bedford (England) jail, where he was confined for more than twelve years (1660–1672) for holding religious meetings at which he preached as a dissenting minister. The first edition of the first part of the Pilgrim's Progress was published in 1678. The subsequent editions of the Progress have been innumerable, and it is said to have been translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible.] 1. Now I saw in my dream that by this time the pilgrims* were got over the Enchanted Ground; and, entering into the country of Beulah, whose air was very sweet and pleasant, the way lying directly through it, they solaced themselves there for a Yea, here they heard continually the singing of birds, season. of a dream." (See Pilgrim's 3. country of Beulah. See Isaiah Ixii., Progress, chap. i.) 2. Enchanted Ground. In the geogra phy of the Pilgrim the Enchant ed Ground lies immediately be- 4: "Thou shalt be called Hephzi-bah, and thy land [shall be called] Beulah." The marginal reference in the English version translates the Hebrew term Beulah married. LITERARY ANALYSIS.—To what class of literary productions does the Pilgrim's Progress belong? Ans. It belongs to the class of allegories.-Define the figure allegory. (See Def. 21.)—What are some other famous allegories in the English language? 1-11. Of how many sentences does paragraph I consist? To which class grammatically does each sentence belong?-How many members (independent propositions) in the first sentence? In the second? In the third?—The three sentences are of the same kind rhetorically considered: are they periods or loose sentences?-Of the 116 words in this paragraph, 82 per cent. are of Anglo-Saxon origin: select the other 21 words. 2. were got. Remark on this grammatical construction. See page 5, note 12 of this book. and saw every day the flowers appear in the earth, and heard the voice of the turtle in the land. In this country the sun shineth night and day: wherefore it was beyond the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and also out of the reach of the Giant Despair; neither could they from this place so much as see Doubting 10 Castle. 2. Here they were within sight of the city they were going to; also, here met them some of the inhabitants thereof; for in this land the shining ones commonly walked, because it was upon the borders of Heaven. In this land, also, the contract* between 15 the bride and bridegroom* was renewed. Yea, here as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so did their God rejoice over 7. voice of the turtle. See Song of Solomon ii., 12: "And the S, 9. Valley of the Shadow of Death. By this expression is not meant 9-11. Giant Despair... Doubting Castle. Progress, an account is given of 14. shining ones. LITERARY ANALYSIS.—12-24. Here... out, etc. One of the sentences in paragraph 2 is a period: which is the sentence?-Note the use of "here" as the introductory word of several of the sentences: is the order of these words the common or the rhetorical order? (See Def. 43.)—Give synonyms of the following words used in paragraph 2: "contract" (15); “abundance" (19); "pilgrimage" (20). 12. the city they were going to. Is this the literary or the conversational form of expression? Change to the literary order. 13. here met them, etc. Remark on the order of the words. 16. bridegroom. What is the derivation of this word? |